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Peter Lewis

Executive Director, Essential Media

Peter Lewis��is executive director of the progressive strategic communications agency Essential Media, the founder of the collaborative engagement platform Civility and a fellow with the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology. For more than two decades he was worked with progressive organisations including unions, NGOs, not-for-profits and responsible businesses to affect progressive social change. He is a regular columnist with Guardian Australian and Fairfax newspapers as well as the author of five books including Webtopia and The Public Square Project.

Shabnam Safa

Chairperson, National Refugee-led Advisory and Advocacy Group (NRAAG)

Shabnam Safa��grew up as a Hazara Afghan refugee in Pakistan before arriving in Australia at the age of 15. Inspired by her own experience of forced displacement, she is a strong advocate for meaningful��participation of refugees in addressing the complex challenges of resettlement. She is the Community Development & Training Lead at Community Refugee Sponsorship Australia (CRSA) and also leads the National Refugee-led Advisory and Advocacy Group (NRAAG) working to create spaces for strategic and influential inclusion of voices with lived experience in shaping policy and public discourse about refugee and people seeking asylum in Australia.��Shabnam serves on various Australian civil society and government boards��influencing policy design and delivery to address the challenges and opportunities facing refugee and migrant communities.��She was recently appointed to the Australian government’s inaugural Refugee Advisory Panel advising��Australia’s engagement with the international refugee protection system and humanitarian assistance.

Amanda Tattersall

Associate Professor of Practice, Sydney Policy Lab

Amanda Tattersall��is an Associate Professor of Practice with the Sydney Policy Lab and School of Geosciences. She is the founder of some of Australia’s most interesting social change organisations, including the Sydney Alliance and GetUp.org.au. She hosts the����that tells stories about people trying to change the world. Her book, Power in Coalition, was the first international analytical study of alliance building as a strategy for social change. ��As an urban geographer, she focuses on questions of how the city can be a subject for democratic politics, exploring how it can be a space where citizens develop different forms of people power to craft solutions to wicked global problems like climate change, poverty, inequality and the politics of refuge. At the Sydney Policy Lab she is the academic leader of its co-design research method and instigated the Real Deal project, which coordinates place-based projects across the country where communities are supported to develop solutions to climate and economic crisis from the ground up. Her PhD was in industrial relations, and she has previously worked as a union organiser. She has experience in many large social movements including against the War in Iraq, in support of refugee rights and as the President of the National Union of Students (NSW) in 1999.

Lenore Taylor

Editor, Guardian Australia

Lenore Taylor��has been the editor of Guardian Australia for seven years and has been with Guardian Australia since its launch in May 2013, when she joined as political editor. Lenore has been honoured with two Walkley Awards and has twice won the Paul Lyneham Award for excellence in press gallery journalism. She is a formidable commentator on the Australian political landscape and has long been a regular guest on radio and television current affairs programs, including the ABC's Insiders.

Chair: Lauren Martin

Communications Manager, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law

Lauren Martin��was appointed the Kaldor Centre’s first Communications Manager in 2016, joining from the Sydney Opera House, where she was Head of Communications. An award-winning journalist, she co-produced the Kaldor Centre’s storytelling project, ‘’. She was an editor in Australia at The Sydney Morning Herald and later of The Global Mail, appearing in that capacity at the Sydney and Melbourne Writers Festivals. In the United States, she was Managing Editor of the [Martha’s]��Vineyard Gazette��and Washington Editor for��Institutional Investor��publications. She earned a BA in Journalism and Political Science (Phi Beta Kappa) at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.��

2023 Conference Panel 3 Scenario, 'Will refugees be welcome?'

Panel 3 discussed the following scenario:

It is 2033. Our sense of social cohesion has further fractured. In Australia, as throughout the world, society is split between competing narratives of nationalism and hyper-localism on the one hand (fuelled by growing inequality and socio-economic uncertainty) and global solidarities on the other (driven by shared environmental threats). Democratic institutions have weakened.

Global North countries still decide ‘who comes to their countries and the circumstances in which they come’ – but now they’re assisted by big data and algorithms that select migrants and refugees for resettlement based on risk profiles and their likelihood of successful integration. The algorithms do not prioritise humanitarian considerations, so the marginalised and most vulnerable are up against it. But tech-vetting has led to increased support for migrants and refugees, as people feel confident that the programs are well managed.

As we read the news in 2033, our personal AI assistants send us ‘critical thinking reminders’ nudging us to explore outside our bubble of AI-aggregated news and urging us to critically assess news stories, which now carry a blockchain ‘proof of provenance’ at the end of each article, showing who created and modified it and when. Still, these are hard work; they’re no match for large-scale disinformation campaigns leveraging generative AI, AI-generated images and fake videos, which have made it impossible to discern what is real and what is not on social media or aggregators, which are the main sources of news for people around the world. Regulation never got in front of the tech developments. People don’t feel they can trust most information they encounter.

However, virtual communities based on shared interests have begun to challenge traditional government power systems. Tech and demographic shifts have opened the way for new players to gain new prominence as influencers of public policy and the discourse on displacement. Social movements with digital firepower have nurtured charismatic new leaders and broader, more engaged memberships that operate both virtually and locally in person. There’s growing cooperation between refugee-led movements and climate movements, which clocked up some vital successes and are more powerful as a result.

Kaldor Centre Conference 2023

Panel Session 3,��'Will refugees be welcome?'

LAUREN MARTIN (LM): Welcome back everyone to the Kaldor Centre Conference. I'm Lauren Martin and I'll be your chair for this session, ‘Will refugees be welcome?’, about the public discourse and its impact on refugees and protection. Thank you all for being here. The plan is for some set up with the scenario. Then about 60 minutes of moderated discussion with the speakers, followed by 15 to 20 minutes of audience Q&A, both through the roving mics and Slido.

Now, today we are talking about the public discourse. But for some, including for some people in this room, the content of that discourse, day in and day out, can be intensely personal. Let's be sensitive to that. We won't shy away from confronting the issues realistically, but it's been a big day in here and there is a lot going on out there and so let's be respectful and take care.

Now we have an amazing panel for you. I would say the best for last, and I'll try to do them justice in just brief introductions.

On your left, Guardian Australia's Lenore Taylor is one of the sharpest and most thoughtful leaders in journalism today. An award-winning journalist who's been with The Guardian since it began in Australia. She's been editor since 2016, innovating, overseeing extraordinary growth, and meeting extraordinary challenges in Australia and around the world. I think Lenore's ideas about the media are consequential and we're very happy to have them and her here – thank you.

From the Sydney Policy Lab, we have Amanda Tattersall, an urban geographer, labour scholar and former unioniser – the union organiser. She's also a serial founder of social change organisations, including Get Up and the Sydney Alliance. She's the author of the book Power in Coalition, the first international analytical study of alliance-building as a strategy for social change, and she hosts Change Makers, which is a fabulous podcast about people trying to change the world. So seriously, if you haven't got it in your queue, pop it in there.

Peter Lewis is executive director of the progressive strategic communications agency, Essential Media. What he doesn't know about strategic comms and public opinion in Australia probably isn't worth knowing. He is also the founder of the collaborative engagement platform Civility, a fellow with the Australia Institute's Centre for Responsible Technology, and he somehow had time to write 5 books and a fortnightly column.

Finally, we're delighted to have with us Shabnam Safa, who leads the National Refugee-led Advisory and Advocacy Group (NRAAG), and who has agreed to step in for Mariam Veiszadeh, who unfortunately had to pull out of today's panel. Thank you, Shabnam. Shabnam grew up in Pakistan as a Hazara Afghan refugee, arrived in Australia at age 15 and doesn't seem to have stopped since. Her day job is about harnessing the goodwill of everyday Australians to expand and improve refugee settlement here, as a senior part of the team at Community Refugee Sponsorship Australia. As the chair of NRAAG, she's working to ensure people with lived experience are not only heard but have influence in shaping policy and public discourse about refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia. She's also just been appointed to the Australian government's first Refugee Advisory Panel, so congratulations on that.

Now, before we go forward let's just take a pause to go back: Ten years ago, Tony Abbott was Australia's new Prime Minister. Rupert still ran the Murdoch press, and Donald Trump was still in real estate and not yet ready to abandon his career as a reality TV host. Still, all three men were already capitalising on issues of immigration, asylum and refugees.

Ten years ago, there was no TikTok. In fact, in 2013 it was still a thing to read news stories about ‘the rise of online video’. WhatsApp had 250 million users; now it has 10 times that, 2.7 billion. Vice Media, which this year declared bankruptcy, had more than 30 international bureaux and more than 1,000 staff. It was the largest digital news organisation in the world. Guardian Australia had just launched, and it now reaches more than 7 million people a month.

Things change. But, quoting Ezra Klein, ‘we should care about how they become different. We should care about what that difference is, but we should want difference.’ So with that, let's head to 2033.

Scenario Voice Over: It is 2033. Our sense of social cohesion has further fractured. In Australia, as throughout the world, society is split between competing narratives of nationalism and hyper-localism on one hand, fuelled by growing inequality and socio-economic uncertainty, and global solidarity is on the other, driven by shared environmental threats. Democratic institutions have weakened.

Global North countries still decide who comes to their countries and the circumstances in which they come, but now they're assisted by big data and algorithms that select migrants and refugees for resettlement based on risk profiles and their likelihood of successful integration. The algorithms do not prioritise humanitarian considerations, so the marginalised and most vulnerable are up against it. But tech vetting has led to increased support for migrants and refugees as people feel confident that the programs are well-managed.

As we read the news in 2033, our personal AI assistants send us critical-thinking reminders, nudging us to explore outside our bubble of AI-aggregated news and urging us to critically assess news stories which now carry a blockchain proof of provenance at the end of each article, showing who created and modified it and when. Still, these are hard work. They're no match for large scale disinformation campaigns leveraging generative AI, AI-generated images and fake videos which have made it impossible to discern what is real and what is not on social media or aggregators, which are the main sources of news for people around the world. Regulation never got in front of the tech developments. People don't feel they can trust most information they encounter.

However, virtual communities based on shared interests have begun to challenge traditional government power systems. Tech and demographic shifts have opened the way for new players to gain new provenance as influences of public policy and the discourse on displacement. Social movements with digital firepower have nurtured charismatic new leaders and broader, more engaged memberships that operate both virtually and locally in person. There's growing cooperation between refugee-led movements and climate movements, which clocked up some vital successes and a more powerful as a result.

[Scenario video ends]

LM: Okay. Our scenario begins by describing our future community, and when I was looking at it last night, I couldn't help thinking about the poet John O'Donohue’s line that ‘even now we have fallen out of belonging’. Shabnam, when we talk about belonging, community, welcome, what do we need to understand? Who's welcoming who into what?

Shabnam Safa (SS): All right, how long have we got? I think that quote, it's really hit me quite strong – ‘we have fallen out of belonging’ – and I don't think we need another 10 years to fully get the grasp of that. I feel like we've done that already. Sorry to be so bleak. In terms of welcoming, you know, and talking about welcoming refugees, that question is a little difficult for me to answer with the different hats that I wear. You know, in my day job I inherently rely on that principle of goodwill and welcoming existing within Australian communities to bring refugees and newcomers and help them thrive, set up new lives and thrive in their local communities. The advocate in me says we still haven't reconciled with our colonial past and present – you know, very, very loudly shown by the referendum results not that long ago – to be able to meaningfully and holistically welcome people.

So, who is welcoming who into what? I feel like we've talked quite a lot about the Global North narrative and Global South narrative today, and to me it just goes you know at the moment we are, and probably in 10 years’ time as the scenario depicts a little bit as well, we are going to continue that trend of the Global North being the welcoming saviour and the Global South being the perfect passive victim and receiver of that whatever comes down. And that's an assumption – not an assumption; a reality and expectation – that we do really need to challenge.

I came to Australia as a refugee at the age of 15 and for the first, about, five years I went to high school here, I went to university. For the first five years, I didn't know what an Acknowledgement of Country was and what the purpose of that was. Just thought that was a thing that people in Australia did, [I] didn't understand it. I was never told about, you know, the history of Australia and what an Acknowledgement of Country signifies. Since understanding, since learning about it from [my] own research, that's, you know, that's a gaping hole in education in Australia, but also [in] what we tell refugees – more like what we teach refugees before they come to the country – about the country and the systems that they do come into. For me, the whole First Nations movement, their history, our shared history, was absent. It didn't exist, and I know that for many refugee communities it's very similar.

So when we are welcoming people, we're probably welcoming them into the narrative that we have very masterfully crafted for ourselves and that makes us feel really good about ourselves. But, you know, it's not meaningful in a sense that it's not allowing people to dig their feet fully into the soil that they now call home. I call myself a refugee settler because I know I benefit from the colonial history of Australia, even if, you know, my reality and the experiences of my ancestors are very similar to what First Nations people here have endured and continue to endure. So, there is that shared connection that for many years at the start of my life in Australia, [the] very formative years of my life, were missing.

So [in the] scenario, I think there's the one positive thing there that said refugee-led movements, there's greater alignment or greater collaboration between refugee-led movements and environmental justice movements. I think that there is a greater alignment or potential for greater alignment between Indigenous causes and refugee alignment because they do come from a shared history. They do come from the consequences of what, you know, certain powerholders in our collective history [have] created for everyone.

LM: So right that we all carry multiple identities, and it'll be interesting, I suspect that we'll tease a little bit more of that out. And you also acknowledge the sort of reality of now, and for which I'm going to move right on to Peter with our scenario. Given our scenario of growing instability and the insecurity – that is not something unfamiliar I imagine from your research. And I would love your take on, in general, whether it's 10 years ago or 10 years from now, what happens to our sense of community when we're in a situation where we feel unstable and insecure?

Peter Lewis (PL): Yeah, hi everyone. It's really interesting, isn't it, that on a whole bunch of issues, from support to for the Voice to Parliament – the referendum proposition that failed – to support for immigration and refugees, the biggest determinant is people's sense of financial security. So, when people say they feel either comfortable or secure, they are significantly more likely – and it's a bigger determinant than your voting intention, it's a bigger determinant than your age – just your level of security, financial security, determines effectively your view outwards to other people. So, without wanting to be trite, the best strategy for building a more open, inclusive Australia would be to make more people feel financially secure. That's probably outside all of our pay grades, but it's the starting point for a lot of the fractures.

I think the second thing, and I'm not sure at the moment – am I in 2023 or 2033?

LM: You can pop back and forth.

PL: I can go, I can sort of go through a few wormholes. So, look, I thought there was a lot of things happening in that scenario, some of which I found quite hopeful, particularly that notion of the movements around refugees and climate coming together in some sort of co-collaboration. I think we're at an interesting moment – I'm sure Amanda can talk about this more – that the institutions of civil society that anchored the industrial era are kind of hollowing out, and in a way they're still there but they don't exert the same influence on either their members or the broader community.

Again, going back to the Voice, it was really interesting, wasn't it that every single church, union, major industry group, most corporates, most sporting organisations, they also said they supported a Yes vote, but the vast majority of their population did not listen to them and they no longer exerted that authority. So, what happens over the next decade in reimagining what, you know, what Galbraith called ‘countervailing power’? What that looks like in a world where the technology is really pushing us all to be a little community of one, through the models of advertising and micro-targeting, will be really critical to how we manage a lot of these issues.

I guess my final initial observation on this is, one, around framing, and I think it was interesting that piece that this morning about a time when refugees were seen as heroes and a positive, rather than I think the discourse of an obligation or a burden, that you embrace people that have come from more difficult circumstances, not because you're offering charity but because you recognise that creates a stronger society.

I remember doing some work with Amnesty – would have been, well, it shows how old I am I can't even remember – but it was in the middle of all the boat people stuff, so I reckon 20 years ago. Okay, we're going back in time another 20 years, and it was really interesting. We went out to you know western suburbs, up on the Central Coast, we're asking people their take on it, and as long as those discussions were abstractions, mythical cues – and if you remember, it was in the shadow of 9/11, not dissimilar to some of, you know, the world in a bit of turmoil, it was also in the context of really Australians starting to feel the pointy end of globalisation – you could see two observations.

One is, you could see what the Liberals were trying to do, which was instead of talk about the fact that Australia was in this global world and they could no longer protect people's economic interests; they'd put up this mythical wall and keep asylum seekers out. But what was even more interesting was the way through it was, we – after about 45 minutes of discussion you asked participants in the group, ‘What personal qualities do you think a refugee would have?’, and all of a sudden these people that are probably never engaged said, ‘They'd have to be really brave’, ‘They'd have to be prepared to risk everything’, and�� there wasn't far to go from there to say, like, they’re the sorts of people that you'd want as Australians.

So, I know there there's a few random things going on there. But I just think if we look at 2033 and the way we're going to be thinking about ourselves as a nation, the way we're going to be looking at each other, it really comes down to the stories we start telling now.

LM: Yeah,�� I think before we get out – I love that story and I think we can tease that out a bit more – I just want to stay with this response that we have in this situation first, and maybe ask you, Amanda, the scenario says we're going further into this ‘citizens of the world’ where have common threats, we have common cause; or where we shrink into our tribal sort of mode. Neither of those is quite the ‘constituency of one’ that Peter was talking about, but can either of those help us? How do we go one way or another, and do we want to?

Amanda Tattersall (AT): Sure. So, I mean part of my reaction to that proposition is don't go in either way. We need to hold things together. I mean, it was part of the challenge of the Voice; you can have all these organisations untethered to their members making positions and not in relationship, and it's a problem. You want to have people caring about what is local and what is immediate and what is relevant, whether it's their income or whether it's their local community and its welfare, and you want people to be thinking of themselves in the context of the world – you want them both. The issue is often that social movements struggle to hold the relationship between the two. Politics tends to struggle to hold the relationship between the two.

For instance, I do some work in the climate movement, and it's cool to talk about the relationship between the refugee movement and the climate movement because I think there's a lot of lessons to learn about what not to do from the climate movement, as well as what to do. I work on a project that's in fossil fuel-affected communities in places like Gladstone, that's facing massive transition because of the end of coal and the end of coal exports. A few years ago, there were huge, violent rallies there against people who wanted to close the mine, and then people violently rallying against that proposition, right. Massive polarisation, massive tension in that community. It's, you know, similar to what you could see around refugees, even though the issues are very, very different.

What we've done in that community over four years is build relationships across difference, right. Recognise that, you know, that proposition, that there is difference among us – always will be, needs to be there, it's our richness – and there's also moments of connection and sameness. In Gladstone, the sameness is they all live in the same place, right. That actually, that locality is a place from which solidarity can grow. So, to me when we think about whether it's refugees or climate, it's about thinking of the geographies of solidarity. And so what we're doing in Gladstone is talking about, okay, we're all going to potentially be subject to these forces that are beyond our control – climate change, it’s global forces that feel that they’re beyond our control, and we can't control for uncertainty. But if we come together across our difference, perhaps we can have enough energy, resources, influence to be able to shape the form of transition and change what we can control – not going to control it, but to shape the transition we experience.

I think that there is something in this tethering of a local conversation with a global and national context that we need to not forget when we're trying to consider how to think about [it]. We need to overcome the idea that we're all localised, and we've got false borders, that we can keep everyone out. We also need to abandon the idea of just abstractness without a recognition that people's values have to land in place, they have to land in people's livelihood, in order to be able to enlist people to be passionate about change.

LM: Absolutely, that's so interesting that the key task – if you're going for some sort of social justice or economic justice – is really overcoming a number of disconnections, and it also invites a public conversation. Lenore, the media's always played a very central role in the public discourse, and in your very publication today, Julianne Schultz described it as ‘democracy's essential feedback mechanism’, but she also described it as ‘broken’.

So, if I can talk to you first about tech and then about trust. When life-or-death decisions 10 years from now are being made by algorithm, do we also have journalists equipped to find and interrogate how those algorithms are working? I mean, I guess maybe even taking a step back from where you are, how do you see technology helping the media and how does it stymie you?

Lenore Taylor (LT): Well, I think in the broad, tech helps us find audiences that we wouldn't otherwise find. The different platforms and the different mechanisms sort of wax and wane over time; Facebook used to be really important, not so much now; Apple News used to not exist, now it's really important; Google, important, but Lord knows when the answers to your search term throw up an AI-generated answer, which is sort of a terrine of information that may or may not be true, rather than an article where you know the provenance of it, but who knows? But broadly, the answer is [that] tech helps us find bigger audiences and it also helps us tell stories in different ways. And, as we've sort of alluded to already, when you can put a voice or a face or a video to a story, people are more likely to empathise with it. That's why previous government spent so much time and effort trying to stop us putting voices and faces to people caught up in offshore detention. There was a reason for that, because they didn't want empathy with those people.

The big downside of tech for us is that we lose control of the context in which people get our information, and that makes it very hard to maintain the trust in us, when people don't know how to differentiate us from the rest of the torrent of stuff that is pouring through their feeds. That's the massive challenge. I think the scenario alluded to the idea of sort of having some sort of blockchain mechanism of attaching a provenance to a story or to a picture. I know the New York Times has actually experimented with that. In our kind of, in a very small way, we stick a big yellow sticker across stories saying ‘This story is two years old’ or ‘four months old’, so people can't take it out of context and sort of resurface it in a different context. That doesn't always work. We had an incident just this week where the letter to America from Osama bin Laden from 20 years ago was resurfaced and shared on TikTok millions of times, and we actually had to take it down because it was just being disseminated out of context in such a potentially harmful way without the context of the story that that text had been embedded in. So that's the big challenge for us, and it comes at a time when lots of people are actively trying to sort of undermine trust in what we do.

I agree with Julianne, I do think that having professional media that has a job of holding people to account, of finding out information that you wouldn't otherwise know, of asking questions of getting to the bottom of things, is actually essential to a democracy. It's not just content, you know, there's a wave of content, but what we do is actually different to that. So, to my mind, one of the most important things is to find a way to stand up for trust in the media and find a way to stand up for, and differentiate, what we do from the great wash of content that comes through people's phones. And I guess, to go to the question of AI, that makes it vastly more difficult. So, I think Steve Bannon once said that the way to deal with the media was to ‘flood the zone with shit’, to just pour so much information into the ecosystem that people lost track of what was true and what was false, and they just became totally overwhelmed. In that circumstance, they will either give up on the news altogether and completely retreat into some sort of isolationist position or choose a tribe – ‘I believe in the red team’ or ‘I believe in the blue team’ – and once people's identity is associated with the tribe they become quite impervious to alternative information. They actively try not to seek into alternative information because they've tied themselves to one particular view. They lose it, they kind of lose the ability to have a critical faculty for their team. I guess that's how you get to a position where 40% of the American population thinks Donald Trump won the election, right? Like, they've kind of lost an ability to see facts.

So I guess the big challenge for us in in all debates, but in particularly in debates where context and nuance and facts are so vitally important, is to find a way to maintain the ability to differentiate what we do and to earn and maintain trust in what we do.

LM: I think that in this it's not just [in] the media, the lack of trust would affect the ways you're all working, and I'm really happy for anyone to jump in here. If we've got disinformation and hyper-partisanship and weakened institutions, what's working to build trust?

PL: Can I throw something in as a lapsed journalist, although as someone that still sees himself 30 years later as someone that likes to think of themselves as a journalist? I think that if you think about the way information's changed, like the way our kids learn now, they've gone from being hunters of information to filters of information, and – present company excepted, of course – I think there is a tendency in large parts of the media, and let's not talk about Murdoch, because that's a totally different conversation, but I think a lot of media is still locked in an industrial age model where they're basically presenting what they think is a scarce amount of fact and often then also saying the news is in the conflict on the interpretation of a piece of fact. We saw that particularly playing out, I want to keep – I feel a bit like a dog returning to its vomit – but just going back to the Voice again, the way that particularly ABC had to have a Yes voice and a No voice on every single angle, which sort of actually distorted the context of the vote which was the vast majority of First Nations people supported it, but Warren Mundine didn't. So that was ‘balance’; I think there's an issue around balance. There's also an issue about finding a point of conflict and then making that point of conflict the news. I won't name broadcasters that do this, but some of you listen to them on Radio National every morning. If you just focus on that, you're creating content that's going to be that's going to work very well on the current information ecosystems that reward virality, but are you providing the context that actually helps people have�� that starting point?

Because if you think about the best thinking on how you address this information, what my friend Ed Coper, who wrote the terrific book [Facts] and Other Lies, points out is [that] you don't start by monstering your opponent. If you can start with some shared set of facts or values, then you can have the conversation, then you do your inoculation to give them a small dose of the truth, just [so] they get used to it, and then you prebunk what's going to come from the other side. My concern is that the way the media, left to its own devices, still runs an industrial model of news, as if the information is scarce, rather than a version where information is everywhere [and] it's the job of media to provide the context and to distill. We run the risk that it's actually feeding into the tactics of those who would divide us rather than those who would unite us.

AT: So, I wanna just, if we're gonna be controversial I'm gonna throw in one, which is: If some of the problems we're facing are product of media systems, then perhaps the answers aren't going to be found there. You know, like I actually think that some of what we need are strategies for us to be able to rebuild the art of public conversation with each other, and the art of relationship-building with each other across difference. You know, irrespective of what is being fed to us in the news. I'm not denying that that's incredibly important, but I don't know if that's tweaking at the press, [if] it's going to fix it for us, you know.

LM: Because it's not just the news, it's the online grifters and the paranoid people on YouTube.

AT: It's such a mess, right? It's such a mess.

LT: But the news is the, I mean, the media is the public. That's the place where the public discourse happens.

AT: That's why I thought it was controversial for me to say it in this context. I'm a community organiser, and I think that actually the lack of conversation is part of the problem. I'll take you to Gladstone. We all thought before, you know, from the press, all the polling suggested that people were highly sceptical about climate change in advance of the 2019 election. That was why they were having these fights. We went there, we started organising and what we found was that that wasn't the issue at all. Actually, in Gladstone, you know things are pretty rough. You can't have a baby in Gladstone, they closed the hospital. They closed the hospital for over a year, and you had to travel to Rockhampton. This was the place that was meant to be the solution for climate transition; it was going to give birth to Australia's climate transition, yet you can't even give birth to a child because the resources had been so dislocated from that community. I think we should – I'm not saying don't fix the press, I'd love for that to happen – but I'm saying it's not the only thing that needs to happen.

I think that this conversation that needs to be able to happen in place about how the community is talking to each other; about the fact that, actually, the workers in the power in the power centre, the coal train drivers, were all part of this alliance that we've built in Gladstone, as well as the Catholic Church and the Salvation Army, [they] all had an interest in making that hospital better as part of a transition plan; that there is the possibility of creating a connection and a sense of sameness across difference through a different way of having a public conversation that I think has to, in part, be face-to-face.

SS: I know Amanda and Peter are being contradictory, but I agree with both of them. I agree that you know–

AT: Sameness across difference, right?

SS: There is, there is a lack of conversation from a community's perspective, not so much the media. And you know, Amanda, you're asking if the community's talking to each other; I don't think the community's talking to each other. I think the community's shouting at each other and no one's listening, and it's the same and that's reflected at a media and then at a political level as well. I think that the more polarised we grow as societies, the more we get all our information from our screens then the less – what is it – the less interested we are in having an actual human conversation with someone else about their realities. That doesn't make it to broader public discourse, that doesn't make it to media discourse and that doesn't make it to political policies at the end. You know, the not shunning away or not monsterising – I can't remember [Peter] your exact words – your opponent; that is very important in a lot of the social justice movements that I see and I'm actively a part of. There is a lot of that there. There is no entry point for someone who doesn't know anything about it. You've either missed the train completely and it's easier and safer to just go back to your camp, or when you do try to engage you get shunned away for not having known anything yet.

LT: Oh, I get the chance? Thanks. I am, I've got to say, kind of shocked at the idea that a community conversation could in any way sort of substitute for the media. I think community conversations are extremely important and to be encouraged, but that's not the same thing as a national conversation in the public square, and that's not the same thing as the role of the media. It's entirely different; people come to that conversation with a horse in the race, with a with a goal, with an aim. People come to that conversation not necessarily willing to acknowledge that maybe – well, with a cause, with an intention, with a goal.

AT: Not always.

LT: And so, I think I disagree quite strongly that that could in any way substitute for the role of the media as the public square, as the place where a national debate or even a local debate happens. Now of course, that does not always happen well or perfectly, and in many cases it happens badly. I don't think it's broken, and I believe with every vibe of my being that it's worth sticking up for. I do, however, really agree with the point about context, and I've just got an anecdote from The Guardian that sort of illustrates that. So, we've had a conversation over recent years about writing stories; say if there's a UK political story where there's been something going on in the UK and then it gets to the point where it's interesting in the US or in Australia, [we] do a sort of global-facing version of that story with all the context to bring new readers into that story. Then it happens vice versa. We do global-facing versions of stories that are happening in Australia, say, about the referendum or whatever else, with no assumed knowledge and an easy entry point for readers. The huge lesson is that those stories do really well in the country of origin as well. The ones that we're writing for the US or the UK, assuming no prior knowledge, actually do really well in Australia, which is a lesson to us about what knowledge and what information we assume our own readers need. We're dialling what we write to take that into account. Because I think sometimes maybe we assume too much knowledge in terms of our readers. So, I think that's quite important.

The other thing I think that's really important in terms of building trust is being in dialogue with your readership: listening to what people say, having conversations below the line, having forum, not just being on transmit, but being on receive as well. There's various ways that we can do that, but I think it really helps us. The other thing that I think builds trust is, the more diverse newsroom that we can have, the more stories that we can tell, the more stories that we see, the more reflective we are of the experience of our readership, the more our readership will trust us to tell the stories that are relevant to them. So, I think all of those things can help us. But I do believe that the media is the place where a public debate needs to happen, [it] is an institution that can't really be replaced.

PL: So, I love The Guardian’s business model and I love The Guardian's mission. The bit that I'm not sure about is whether the media is the public square or the town crier, and if all there is–����

LT: But what else could be? What could replace it?

PL: So, Elon Musk thinks that Twitter is the public square and, you know, Facebook wanted to be so as someone–

LT: But the public square needs to have the guardrails of truth, and that's what we can try and do. Twitter has no guardrails of truth.

PL: The image of a public square is a coming-together of people, and the media, by its definition, mediates that – and that's the important role. But the square exists separate to, but in relation to, I think-

AT: But it doesn't need to be one or the other, right?

PL: But that’s where definitions and roles get important, though.

AT: In democracy, we have representative democracy, we have participatory democracy, we have associational democracy. So representative democracy, is like a representation of news ...

PL: Sorry you're losing this, Lauren.

AT: ... you know, I mean, like, we can have all of these spaces ...

LM: I’m kind of just enjoying this.

AT: We need all of these spaces. I wanted to just open it up to sort of talk about the fact that, you know, being able to have face-to-face conversations, being able to build the capacity for us to be able to talk to each other, whether it's through community organisations or whether it's through the collapse or failure of our public schools – I mean public schools are those spaces where everyone comes together – we need spaces where strangers work out how to live with each other. At the moment, we have an increasingly bubbled society where we don't need to interact with people who are different, and that means we don't learn how to trust difference, and that means that we have a very narrow sense of solidarity. What we what I'm urging is that a broad-based sense of solidarity is possible and real and can be created by the press, but most importantly can be created in institutions on the ground.

LM: I don't think they're mutually exclusive; they're mutually reinforcing. I think Lenore's point about guardrails of truth is needed as much in a public-school gymnasium, or auditorium at UNSW, as it is in the media or in Gladstone or wherever.

I'm interested, Shabnam, if it, if you can take this for us next to how we work in this broader discourse, in all spheres, to bolster public opinion about [the] asylum system in Australia and empower refugees themselves to impact. I mean Lenore hinted at this, with the real commitment – I think that is not shown across the media but is certainly shown at the Guardian – to bring new voices into the newsroom. You would have thought about a lot of different ways to do this.

SS: My gut instinct, or the first response, I'd say, is take it out of the public opinion. We've been debating about it too much and debating about it in a hostile way, and it's just become this, you know, this this monstrous issue that we can't deal with. Whereas from my day job, I see people dealing with it every day on the ground and doing it really well, so there is that disconnect. You know, whether for political reasons or all the other reasons, some complete alternate reality has been created around refugees. You [Peter] mentioned that we've gone from, you know, from stories of heroes to narrative[s] of, what was it, duty?

PL: Charity and obligation.

SS: Of charity and obligation. And I think both of those are flawed. You know, we don't need refugee heroes; we don't need refugees who depend on charity. We just protect people because they are human, and they just got caught in a circumstance outside of their control, and that should be the principle. We shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't promote stories of refugees who are the shining stars, who are the neurosurgeons – we should promote and celebrate it – but we shouldn't only promote and celebrate that. And then we shouldn't also only talk about the problems in that community, because currently – what's the number? – ����there's over 110 million people who are currently forcibly displaced, let alone everyone who has been displaced and [have] become refugees before that, and those coming and becoming refugees in the future. There is no way a single story or a few handpicked stories with, you know, very nicely crafted taglines will be able to represent the full reality. That's when it comes undone at the ground level, when people come into contact with someone that didn't fit that picture. You know, we now have refugees coming to Australia who are social media influencers. People welcoming them have no idea how to deal with that, because they go, We didn't think refugees could be that, you know? How could someone have millions of followers and become a refugee?

We've seen that narrative flip a little bit with the whole, you know, the Western world now experiencing the circumstances of becoming forcibly displaced and [becoming] refugees; referring to Ukraine, you know, how the world reacted – how the media reacted – to Ukraine versus six months before that [when] Afghanistan collapsed, we had to beg people to pay attention. The conversation is changing now that instability is becoming more of a phenomenon in the Global North, as well, or in the Western world.

I was recently in Europe for a conference on community sponsorship and I realised, or I heard, that certain countries in Europe have changed the visa for Ukrainian refugees; they're not referred to as ‘refugees’, they're referred to as ‘guests’. Can you imagine what sort of what sort of misconceptions that creates for people on the ground, who have to either support at their day jobs, or write about, or work with refugees from all parts of the world, when certain refugees are referred to as ‘guests’, as people who need to be welcomed because they have gone through something really terrible and we can relate to it? But with certain cohorts and populations we absolutely cannot relate to – that's very much demonstrated in the topic and in the conversations and debate around Israel and Palestine right now. That’s where some of our solidarity models really do get contradictory there. We’ve got huge solidarity for where, at least we thought we did, for Indigenous causes in Australia, but we don't talk about it the same way when it comes to Palestine, or we can all jump on the bandwagon of Israel having a right to defend itself, knowing exactly what that means.

In terms of how we change things in the public opinion, I feel like we can start with sharing the true, human stories of refugees. They are not all shining stars, not all neurosurgeons. They're not all receivers of charity and a duty and obligation on our state. It's a spectrum, and that's what needs to be focused [on], and we can't do that unless we bring people, who understand that at a very intimate level from their own experiences, to really talk about it in that nuanced way so it doesn't become just the one or the other narrative. We really need to accept that diversity of experiences and stories.

LM: I'm just going to say that we've been talking about the public conversation, and we've left out the elephant in the room of the public conversation. Lenore, can we wrench this [debate] away from the people who actually are responsible for implementing the policy, who tend to increasingly speak in extremes, speak to small segments of their voter base – can we wrench it out of Parliament, or, how do we deal with that part of the public discourse, especially in a role like yours?

LT: Sorry, I'm finding it really hard to hear you ... How do we wrench it away from what, sorry?

LM: Sorry, the parliamentarians and the rhetoric that we get from there, because at the moment we're sort of ignoring that and they're a very loud voice in this.

LT: Yeah, they are. I mean, I think we've got – well, there's numbers of ways – I think we have to be very careful about just repeating the language that politicians use when it's inaccurate or false. We've spent years trying to correct the idea that, you know, that there's something unlawful about seeking asylum. We're not stenographers, so we don't need to just unthinkingly repeat what they write or what they say or report what they say without putting proper context and truth around it. I think that's one thing that we can do.

Also, I think that they're not necessarily the centre of the debate. I mean there's a political context, and a policy-making context, and then we have a responsibility to look at actually what's happening and what and the impact of that policy and what's happening on the ground. So, I think we can do that as well.

I guess there's also, I mean for me there's also always the question of how much time we spend sort of countering narratives that other parts of the media like to propagate. That's always a judgement call because, you know, if I was to jump in and sort of factcheck or counter every single time something is said somewhere else that's false or wrong, my reporters would spend all their time doing that and we'd never be writing the stories that we wanted to write about. That said, it's also important to provide an alternative voice and to provide an alternative to a narrative that is really unhelpful and oftentimes destructive. So, I guess there's a bunch of different ways that we can go about that.

LM: I'm just going to open it up to questions from the audience. So if anyone has one, I suspect you might, please put up your hand. We'll go really quickly. I was going to ask one more question here.

Maybe while we're getting the mics; if I could ask you one thing that needs to change, if we're to avoid the worst and amplify the best of that future, what would it be and what one thing do we need to understand better? Peter?

PL: I'll kick off. We need a Dunkirk-style rescue mission to get people off the corporate digital platforms that are designed to divide us and whip up anger, and we need greater digital literacy [about] exactly what's being done to our public square.

LM: Interesting, Amanda?

AT: Yeah. So, I think that's great, we should do that. Then I also think that we need to be able to massively increase the capacity in our community to have conversations with each other. And I mean the kind of conversations which aren't ideological; the conversations that go, ‘oh, tell me more about who you are and where you come from, and I can tell you a little bit about me and where I come from. We're not going to put labels on it; we're going to recognise that we're all multiply interesting, diverse people that can't be boxed in, and to be able to start creating a broad solidarity from there – w[TT1]��hether that happens in schools, or whether that happens in community organisations, or whether that happens in alliances, ��or whether that happens wherever – so that in 10 years' time, that that is a widespread practice. Because then whatever happens in whatever forces we can't control, there is a sense of solidarity and capacity that can handle them.

PL: And just to torture that as a metaphor, it's about shifting politics from a spectator sport to community sport. If you think about the way, the different way, we approach – when we're playing the game with people at the local park – that's what we've got to do with our politics, right? Yeah, absolutely.

AT: Absolutely.

LM: I'll come back to Lenore and Shabnam. We'll go to the question here.

Audience: Thanks. My question is for Lenore. This week Nick McKim was interviewed about the horrors that were happening in Parliament House and he said that he believes that the journalists were a lot to blame because they were simply reporting the horrors that were being stated in Parliament without really looking at it and analysing it.

LT: I'm not aware of the interview you're talking about, but I think that goes to the question of reporting in context, and I guess one of the things that is a debate in the media – and I think an important debate – is sort of what objectivity means. We always say we need to be objective, but objectivity doesn't mean reporting one side and the other side in equal measure if they don't have equal merit. Objectivity doesn't mean reporting something out of context or reporting something, you know, to be untrue just because a politician said it. So, I don't know the context of what Nick McKim said, but I think that can be a legitimate criticism of the media, and it's something that we need to think about. Objectivity means following the facts where they lead you no matter where they lead you, but it doesn't mean just – look, like we're not stenographers – it doesn't mean just reporting what's said without context.

LM: Thanks, and we have another question.

Audience: Yes, hello, I'm ‘Alopi Latukefu from the Edmund Rice Centre for Justice. Sorry, can you hear me now? I was just interested in this conversation because it talks as if there are these institutions like the media like and NGOs and other organisations that have a pre-eminence in the process of the public square. And I know from my own culture in the Pacific, we didn't have the media determining the public conversation. In fact, we had a tradition of talanoa, of bringing people together with differences of opinion to find solutions. And it is something which I, wonder, whether there is more opportunity to bring some of that into the space when there is such pressure from interests that are outside of the community driving the agenda. Thank you.

LM: Anyone want to comment on the need for talanoa?

PL: Yeah, well, I think you're totally right about – it's a design challenge, right? Amanda and I – and hello, Naomi over there, as well – come from unions, where our organising principle was anger, hope, action. You start at the anger. Politics is to find the point of difference.

PL: Oh, well. But there are alternate models – why don't you start a conversation with what do we agree on and then go to the points? If you can isolate points of agreement before you interrogate the points of friction, it's gonna be a very different dynamic, right? And so, it becomes a design challenge about how you create public spaces and how you curate those discussions.

AT: Can I just add to that? Like, there's a principle that we use in our co-design work at the university called ‘relationships precede action’, right? And so that's a different idea, which is that you actually get to need to know each other in a fairly deep and sincere way before you're gonna work together. So rather than seeing each other as issues, opportunities or possibilities for common ground, see the whole person and then the process can surprise you. You know, like when we were working at the Sydney Alliance – this is a long time ago – big coalition of lots of different religious organisations, unions and community organisations, we had some extraordinary conversations with people across difference, including all the different religious groups, conversations about the Middle East with people who had different perspectives on it. Not because we thought anyone was there to evangelise, or anyone was there to convince each other of what was going on; they were there to understand where each other came from. But that was only possible over years of relationship-building, where people just got to know each other and got to understand each other and trust each other – trust each other enough to have one of those hard conversations where they knew there was (could be) flames, in a space that was there was trust with others, where you could you could have that kind of conversation. Look, sometimes, and in a crisis it's not possible, right? The conversation I'm talking about, you couldn't have it now – you can't have that sort of stuff happening when there's the flames of crisis. But if you build the trust before a crisis, then something very different is possible.

LM: You've just got to do the work. Lenore, I'm just going to, while we get to the next audience question – part of what the news is, is responding to crises. And how do you deal with that knowing that people like to find a middle ground, they like to, you know, find agreement? And the business and it's your competitors, everything's driven by this sort of fast-streaming crisis, not just the Steve Bannon shit, but the real stuff – and I use that word because Steve Bannon did.

LT: I guess in any crisis the best thing we can do is present the best facts that we have at the time, and then correct them if they turn out to be wrong, and can be open with readers about what we don't know. And I think that's been like in reporting on Israel, Hamas has been – we have a 24/7 live blog and we're really careful to only say what we know, to always attribute what we're saying to a source that people know where it's come from. It's a very difficult thing to report on because you don't know a lot of things and you just have to say when you don't know. I think the that in a sort of in an unfolding crisis, that's the best service that we can provide to people.

LM: Thanks. Do we have another question from the audience here? Great. Please go ahead.

Audience: Thanks. Really interesting panel discussion. We've spoken so much about the public sphere. I'm a sociologist, and so a lot of what we've been talking about reminds me of the work of Habermas, who obviously spent a lot of time writing about the public sphere, and he would argue that the quality of the media is obviously fundamental, but as is the quality of debate and the way people approach things. So much of what was spoken about really went to the fact that being a participant in the public sphere involves a skillset; it involves the ability to assess information; it involves the ability to have a critical perspective; it involves all these things. This is a skillset that's often taught by, say, a Bachelor of Arts degree, which is not really in favour at the moment – it's become more expensive and people are kind of discouraged from doing it in favour of STEM – and it's also something that gets taught across the more social science-y parts of secondary education which maybe isn't as common as it should be as well. So, I'm wondering for people's reflections on how we teach the skillset to be a good participant in the public sphere. Because if we just draw people together into a community setting and people will lack the ability to debate in this way, then the public sphere comes to naught.

LM: If you don't mind, I'm going to start with Shabnam, because you began with talking about the failure of the education system in in your view.

SS: Digital literacy goes, you know, will do wonders. People just need to know what is out there to, then, make decisions for themselves. A lot of what I do with my lived-experience advocate hat on, I talk about capacity-building. You need to level the playing field for people to have a meaningful impact and influence on things that they can influence. I feel like currently with public debate on any issue, really, there are your influencers with huge platforms that have probably gotten there without any credibility or any accountability; their platforms aren't being held accountable, but their platforms are shaping public narrative because it's making things easier for other people.

When people feel the need to – when people are empowered and they feel like they are agents of change, they will go and make those changes in those smaller conversations, in those local groups and hopefully – optimistic thinking – that, you know, that will challenge the broader, lazy, social-media influencing narrative. But people need the skills, the tools, the equipment to be able to come to those conversations informed and resourced.

LM: Amanda, did you want to jump in?

AT: Yeah, I was just – I think, completely, skills for entering the public debate are necessary. And I think that there's things that can be taught in organisations as well as Arts degrees, which I also have one – bless the Arts degree. But I also think there's another part of the public discourse, which is the power dynamics of it, right? Like, we're not all equal in the public discourse. Some people have a much louder voice than others in the public discourse. And the only way to really challenge that is for communities to recognise that they need to be able to understand how power works in the public discourse and to organise countervailing forms of power to be able to participate. You know, it's not just about going, “Oh, it's terrible that, you know, Murdoch has a lot of power.” It's also about going, “OK, well, how are we going to convene alternative voices and alternative forms of power?”

So, I think there's the sort of, literally the capacity to be a citizen, you know, to engage in public life – that is a skill, and I think it's learnt through activity as well as being trained. But then I think a key element of that skill is to sort of let go of the veil of thinking that, in a liberal society, that we're all equal because [whilst] there’s an idea that we're equal, there's also the reality that we're not, and that we need to be able to build a power with other people to be able to respond.

PL: But I also think there's a series of perverse incentives to be a bad citizen. If you look at what digital platforms reward performative anger – loud, brazen comments, really bad dad jokes, all those sorts of things – you don't get rewarded for nuance or for a post that says “on the one hand, but on the other hand”. So, we've got to look at the way we're designing our – again, it's a design challenge as well: How do we reward good citizenship in the ecosystems we build for people to participate on?

LM: I think that a question from Slido is just building on this, and that is: “We can teach digital literacy, but trying to discern what is real and what is not seems like so much hard work. How do we overcome that barrier?”

LT: So, I would argue, obviously, that having trusted sources of news and information is a way to overcome that barrier because it even for, you know, very digitally literate people, it's going to become harder and harder. I mean, AI can produce a very good semblance of a news article, a very good semblance of a report, but it can be completely wrong – and it's quite convincing – and you don't even need content farms anymore, it's just going to sort of flood on out there. So, I think that makes it more and more important to be able to discern places and sources of news and of information that you know you can rely on, that you know the provenance of.

SS: On that, though I might be contradicting my earlier point here, what the current online media platforms have also enabled is communities that traditionally don't have that position – those positions of power or those loud voices – the entrance in[to] the public discourse. It's given them that access. So, while we can teach, [and] we can talk all about digital literacy, and you know that there is a lot of fake news and a lot of real news out there, there's sometimes that fake news, what someone perceives something as fake news, [which] is probably real reality that they just don't resonate with at all, and they have never heard it before except for that source. I see that playing out quite a bit right now with the Israel-Palestine situation – a lot of the influencers, press personnel, their social media accounts are being flagged as spreading misinformation and that's because the information they are sharing is not being shared in mainstream media or you know the mainstream media that we consume in Western society. So, it is challenging those power dynamics. If we keep waiting for the right way of including all the voices, we probably might not get there at all. So, it's disrupting it a little bit so that we can be awakened to the fact that more voices need to be present in conversations.

LT: Can I just put in a quick plea to ban the term ‘fake news’? Because it was developed by Donald Trump to delegitimise news. If it's fake, it's not news. I mean I'm not criticising [Shabnam], like, obviously it's a term that's around; I would just like to ban it.

PL: I just had a quick – ‘cause I really respect this push back on my “digital platforms are terrible” and that, you know, “Black Twitter, it allows communities...”. But [Shabnam], my question is, because of the way they work, is it still amplifying the worst voices in your community or is it creating a more civil debate? Are those perverse incentives still at play or and could we design better ways of working?

SS: Peter, those communities are just like any other communities. You know, they have the loud voices, they have their power dynamics, they have their powerful and people who are oppressed, and then the loud voices get the media. But it is still better than not having any voice at all.

LM: But, and I do have a quote, if anybody's read Naomi Klein's Doppelganger at the moment, on that exact point – because I'd like then to interrogate you, Amanda, about movement leadership from a broader perspective – she says, “With online clout too often determining movement leadership with few ways to hold those leaders accountable, conflict and mistrust easily spread, supercharged by algorithms hooked on rage and egged on by fake accounts and Russian bots that heaped salt on all our open wounds. It felt like nothing could be trusted, least of all one another.” And she was talking about the climate community.

AT: I mean, part of the challenge is that when we use the word “leader”, they don’t really reflect what we need as qualities of leaders; actual community leaders are people who are in relationship with other people across their community. They're people who are able to have a level of objectivity over their environment, to be able to be intermediaries within their communities, right? They're not positional leaders. But when we think about someone who pushes themselves out there as [a] leader, who maybe gets a lot of attention on social media or whatever, they're the opposite; they're on a soapbox telling everyone what to think and do – that's not leadership. That's not leadership. Leadership is more about listening than talking. Leadership is more about understanding common ground and difference and holding both spaces.

But we don't have – I think that's part of our challenge. We don't have a space for recognising – there's a distortion, not only a distortion in our conversation, there's a distortion in understanding about what is powerful in our communities, to make them work. You know, so we're looking for these – the idea that Trump is some kind of leader, that is a vision for what we need – that’s distorting our sense of how we're going to be able to find a way out of this mess.

LM: And I think we've canvassed so many great areas of your expertise here. I want to draw you all out, if I can, back to: How do we take all this and find a way so that in 2033, refugees will be more welcome than they are now in Australia or around the world? Oh, look, I see nobody racing to put their microphone up.

PL: Well, it's a design challenge or, you know, a co-design challenge. It's imagining the future you want and then working out the steps you need to take, but also recognising that the path we're on probably looks a bit like the video we had at the beginning. And if we don't want that, we've got to actually take responsibility for that – and yes, it involves better media; yes, it involves empowering civil society; yes, it involves reimagining how we connect through technology.

AT: I'll throw in one. I think it's probably not seeing "refugee issues” as “refugee issues”, but actually seeing it as a sort of – the climate movement has done quite a good job at recognising over time (Naomi Klein wrote a book about this about 10 years ago as well) that it's everything, right? It's a sort of public dimension; it's a way of seeing all the things that we experience. That is also true of the issues around refugees. Refugee issues aren't just a sort of box that we need to tick like a ministerial portfolio. The issues, whether it's the fears associated with people who are refugees, or it's the politics of people coming over – it's everything. And so, if we're going to be in that place in 10 years' time, I think it's about de-linking: not seeing refugees as a box but seeing interlinkages of refugee politics and refugee experience and practice as connected to all the other issues – like we've done today on climate – but all the other issues as well.

SS: Yeah, thank you for that; it kind of gives me a bit of language as well. It’s that, you know, it is really hard to keep talking about refugee issues in silos, in our own little echo chamber. We all here know what some of the issues, what most of the issues, are and we'll probably agree on the solutions for that as well. But we shouldn't be talking about that with each other. We should be talking about that with people who don't talk about refugee issues in their day-to-day. It's not part of their day-to-day, and they resign it to the fact that a few humanitarian organisations or some civil societies [or] NGOs will take care of that issue.

It is part of our – of everyone's day-to-day life now. The little cynical part of me says – I can't help thinking about how refugee issues used to be an “everybody issue”, when say, post-World War 2, when the whole world was in turmoil or most of the West was in turmoil. Then it kind of became an issue that we don't talk about [anymore]; it's only certain groups, certain people. Then, they were demonised and because of political ground blah blah blah. And now we're coming back to that; it is everybody's issue because we're seeing more conflict, more insecurity in the Western world. So, I feel like we just need to understand: Why do we want to change the conversation on refugee issues in the first place? Why? What will that serve? Is it because we want to create a population that will hopefully hold their powerholders to account and we will no longer have wars and no longer have refugees? Or do we start seeing refugees as people and, you know, their refugee experiences as just part of their life and they’re just as capable as anyone else to build better lives in wherever they end up? So, just some questions there.

LM: Having the same cost of living and economic issues ...

SS: Yeah. And don't scapegoat, don't make refugees the scapegoat for all those issues. You know, housing right now – we can't talk about refugee issues because everyone's like, “Housing! They will come and take all our houses like they used to come and take all our jobs!” There's structural issues that everyone's facing and refugees are included in that, in all of those problems. When we as refugees come to countries where we've resettled, the majority of us don't, we inherit all of those problems as well, as well as the opportunities and everything else.

LM: Lenore, do you see welcome for refugees?

LT: I think the probably one incredibly important thing – given that we are going to face such incredible challenges that are going to make people feel overwhelmed and scared, given that misinformation is going to be an even bigger problem than it is now – I think holding a place where you can have a factual, trusted conversation about the issues that are going to be so challenging is really important.

LM: I'm going to take another question from Slido, which is: “How can diverse stories be told, and who should be telling them? Keeping in mind algorithms often lock people out of the discourse too.” We've covered a bit of this, but it's a very specific question about how we tell these diverse stories.

SS: I think context is important. I don't think saying “only certain people should be telling certain stories and that's it” is very helpful in building meaningful discourse and dialogue. But, there will be [and] there are certain stories that only story-holders should be sharing, or [who] should have a louder voice in shaping those stories. What I'm trying to say is that if only a certain group of people talked about their stories, and [if] others who don't resonate with them [or] don't relate with them didn't hear those stories, then we kind of end up back where we are. So, we do need the trusted mechanisms as well the trusted sources. You know, in all of my advocacy on refugee issues, I don't think I have pitched media articles to non-left-leaning media agencies as I’m constantly being advised that they won't pick it up. [What] I haven't had the brain space or the time to do is to actually pitch and go, you know, we want to share these stories with others who don't get to hear it as well. I think context is important. Lived experience is important, those voices that definitely should be amplified. But everyone else also needs to be talking about those stories and those experiences in a respectful way.

AT: I want to throw in just another additional thought around that. So, taking lessons out of the mental health/mental illness space, right. So how do people change their attitudes towards stigmatised people with a mental illness? The research says that the most effective spokespeople are people in your space; if you're a student at university, another student at your university telling a story about their experience with mental health is the most persuasive. If you're in a particular school, a parent at that school sharing their story about mental health is the most persuasive. In a sense, we're going to need a lot of people to speak, both across questions of identity and experience, and then I think people with just proximity to each other. This sense of, if you're already in a trusted relationship with someone, they are a trusted messenger, and the sense that we want them to be speaking into the debate as well. So, lots of voices, in that sense.

LM: And I'm going to come back to Lenore and Shabnam with the question I asked the others earlier: What one thing needs to change if we're to avoid the worst and get the best out of the 2033 scenario? And what would you say is one thing that we just need to understand better?

LT: At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I would say that maintaining some sort of semblance of trust in the national discourse is incredibly important. There are far more PR people in the world at the moment than journalists. They all look at the media as a prism through which you can kind of get a message across, or you can sell something, or [as] something to be gotten around. That's not the same as journalism. It's not the same as the role that we need to play in a democracy and the role that we need to play in society. I do think it's under threat, so I would say that's the thing we need to hold onto.

SS: I don't actually know. I feel like I sort of mentioned a few of the points there already. For the benefit of the audience in this room particularly, I think it would really help us to understand the evolving refugee populations around the world and the dynamics and the demographics and the context that they come from. We're no longer just receiving people in in a humanitarian way and supporting them – it's not that saviour complex, that industry needs to go. People are coming charged and ready to be change agents from day one, or even before that and that needs to be recognised and studied a little bit more and how that affects everything really. And just keep talking – on both sides, let’s establish trust; less virtue-signalling but then also less name-calling.
LM: Yeah. Do we have time for one more question from the audience? Yes. We'll take one more question up there.

Audience: Thank you. Hi. This is Mimi from the National Refugee Advocacy and Advisory Group. Thank you, Shabnam, for talking about how important it is to shift from the narrative that, you know, promote refugees as heroes all the time. But often I find that that's what media will pick up to promote as well. I was wondering, based on your work in this space, what are creative ways that perhaps communities could be using to get these ordinary stories that get people to actually know who a refugee is without being that spectacular person achieving something to be noticed? What could be done, easy ways, to kind of bring those stories to the into the homes of Australians?

SS: Thanks, Mimi. I don't think there is an easy way there. I do accept that there's a lot of work for us as refugee communities to do that too, to be willing to find creative ways and actually work on building relationships. But to the earlier part of your question around the stories that do sell in the media, the number of times that I've been told by journalists and reporters that: “we won't cover that story because that person's already been – it's already been shared in another platform or that story has already been capture”, “we want a different angle, we don't want the usual advocates”, “we want people on the ground” -�� without realising that creates huge safety issues, and people on the ground may not have that mental space to talk about their context in an objective way. So, you know, currently I see media as trying to find novelty in refugee stories all the time – [Lights dim momentarily] Oh, maybe we need to go home.

LM: Maybe it's a message.

SS: Yeah, so, work on both sides. I think media needs to be more open to sharing good, bad and neutral stories, just need to get it out there to hopefully shift perspectives. But then refugee communities and advocates also need to be willing to work more creatively with media and others.

LM: Thank you so much, and I think what's become really evident through this conversation is that no matter what perspective you're coming from, we're all human beings facing a lot of big challenges ahead. And I'm very sorry to have to bring this session to a close because I feel like we could pick their brains for quite a lot longer. But thank you for all your wonderful questions on Slido and in person, and thank you, Lenore, Amanda, Peter and Shabnam.

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